Mission Neighborhood Resource Center director Laura Guzman (left) and Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness listen to a homeless man at the center Tuesday.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Mission Neighborhood Resource Center director Laura Guzman (left)...

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Friedenbach feeds the meter at the Mission center. Guzman credits the coalition for the center's founding in 2002.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Friedenbach feeds the meter at the Mission center. Guzman credits...

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Laura Guzman, the head of the resource center, hugged James Oliveri, a center regular. The San Francisco Homeless Coalition will celebrate its 25 year anniversary shortly. The current head of the Coalition Jennifer Friedenbach visited the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, a Coalition organization, Tuesday December 11, 2012.

A drop-in help center that handles 300 homeless people a day. Permanent homes for 1,300 more. Millions of dollars in shelter funding in San Francisco. A newspaper written and hawked by street people that has put $8 million cash into their hands.

None of this would have happened if a few activists hadn't gotten together 25 years ago this month and formed San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness.

Most people know the coalition as the band of protesters who show up at Board of Supervisors meetings to rail against cuts to anti-poverty programs, or who rally against the roustings of homeless encampments.

But there is much more to the collection of poorly paid, mostly volunteer antipoverty activists.

Some of those who started out at the nonprofit's cramped, messy office on Turk Street have gone on to form more than a dozen social justice programs, from the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, which battles sex trafficking, to the People Organized to Win Employment Rights, a welfare rights group based in San Francisco.

And though coalition workers usually delight in poking a finger in the eye of "the man," several have burrowed into the establishment to promote change from the inside.

Those include Malika Saada Saar, the former coalition worker who founded the Rebecca Project and became an adviser to President Obama on women's issues. Former coalition civil rights coordinator Alex Vitale is now a sociology professor at highly regarded Brooklyn College, and the nonprofit's former editor Lydia Ely is a manager in the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Housing.

"The outside world tends to think that we're just a reactionary organization, but we see the coalition as a place where people - and that mostly means homeless people - can come and create change," said Jennifer Friedenbach, the 46-year-old director of the coalition. "And I'd say we've done quite a bit to help create solutions.

"This place is kind of like an overly active mother giving birth over and over again."

Seen as more ally than foe

To their detractors, coalition activists are seen as mostly enabling bad behavior by fighting for people's rights to panhandle and camp in the streets. To their supporters, they are embraced as fearless champions.

As the mayor's point man on homelessness, Bevan Dufty holds a job that takes a share of heat from the coalition - as he has over initiatives to bring chronic street inebriates to court. But he said he views the group as more an ally than a foe, and he has welcomed its help on issues that include getting $3 million restored in this year's city budget for shelter funding.

"I think people sometimes only see them through one lens, but that is unfair and inaccurate," Dufty said. "They do exist to challenge us and to make us uncomfortable and think of things in a different way, and I'm OK with that."

The coalition was formed in December 1987 by a ragtag group of homeless people, community activists and poverty-aid organizations alarmed by an explosion of street people and the erosion of billions of dollars in annual federal funding for affordable housing.

From the beginning, nobody was shy about screaming against what they saw as injustice, such as fighting efforts to limit homeless people's activities - from camping to panhandling.

Coalition workers once accused then-Mayor Willie Brown of "aesthetic cleansing" when he cracked down on the proliferation of shopping carts being pushed by the homeless, and in 2008 they passed out leaflets depicting Mayor Gavin Newsom as a scythe-wielding Grim Reaper wanting to cut poverty programs.

But they eventually realized that mere advocacy wasn't enough, so they began creating programs.

One of the most significant efforts came in 1990 when the group led the formation of Community Housing Partnership supportive housing nonprofit. Today, the partnership houses 1,300 formerly homeless people in 12 buildings, and provides its residents with a wide range of services from job training to substance abuse counseling. It has an annual budget of $16 million.

Among other organizations the coalition had a substantial hand in starting are the female-only A Woman's Place shelter and transitional housing complex, the First Avenues family shelter, and the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center.

The Mission center was founded in 2002 on Capp Street as a drop-in center for impoverished people, offering help with immigration troubles, health care, showers and lockers. Today, it serves 300 people a day.

"This place didn't have a chance of happening without the coalition," said center director Laura Guzman. "They really saw the need for neighborhood-based centers like this."

Ely, the supportive housing project manager for the Mayor's Office of Housing, helped start in 1989 what is now the nation's oldest continuously published street newspaper - Street Sheet. It began as a handout at a Phil Collins concert, and when she found she had extras after the show, she gave them to homeless people to sell for $1 apiece on the street.

8 million Street Sheets

Today, more than 200 homeless folks hawk 32,000 copies a month, still for $1 a copy - and they get to keep the money they make, which can come to $30 a day. To date 8 million copies have been sold.

"So many people are frustrated with global warming, with homelessness, other issues - but to be able to do something about it eight hours a day is awesome," Ely said about her work as Street Sheet editor until 1999 and her other related poverty-aid jobs since then.

Those eight hours have never been lucrative at the coalition, though.

Always run on a shoestring, the organization operates these days on $280,000 a year in private donations, and it has a few regular employees - and 50 volunteers. Friedenbach is paid $22,000 a year, the others make about the same, and the rest of the budget goes toward rent, insurance, printing the Street Sheet and the like.

"You don't do this kind of job to get rich," Friedenbach cracked.

Perhaps best-known of all the coalition's characters is co-founder Paul Boden, 53. He gleefully badgered San Francisco's leaders over policy and funding with his profanity-laced tongue as coalition director for 16 years until 2005, when he left to help form the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

As organizing director of the San Francisco-based group, he now badgers leaders both regional and nationally, contributing to congressional briefings on civil rights and affordable housing. But his heart is still also with the coalition, which is one of several nonprofit poverty-aid agencies listed as participating "members" of his group.

"The coalition has developed a really strong legacy of not just talking but creating stuff," said Boden. "I'm proud to say WRAP is part of that."